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well hello thanks for joining me today and this is the latest addition to free webinars being offered by data products my name is Monica Felix and I'm the program manager for Data Products LLC data science consultancy based right here in Chicago today's webinar is an introduction to data management for nonprofits and I'll start by sharing my screen so that you can see these lovely slides that we put together just as a small reminder we'll be posting these to our site YouTube other areas and it'll be brief today 15-20 minutes just for a few quick introductions to data management if you have any questions on this topic or have a suggestion for a future topic for a free webinar go ahead and send it to contact at data products dot io now just to tell you a little bit about myself I have experience working in Chicago nonprofits and startups which have a lot of similarities it means that I've had plenty of opportunities to experience a lot of the software that is being used and some of the frustrations that come along with it but just like some of you I have also been a part of teams that managed a lot of information and Excel spreadsheets or Google sheets now today we'll talk about why it is important to have a very clear data strategy to help manage your information with nonprofits and startups especially organizations tend to come up with solutions only after a problem develops we'll get to that soon but for now I'd like to share an interesting fact with you nonprofits in the United States currently spend 60 billion dollars annually to raise 300 billion dollars that's 20 cents on the dollar now as you all know a lot of that money goes towards operations facilitating the activities that allow you to fulfill your mission this is why having an effective data strategy is crucial to ensure that you're avoiding common mistakes that can lead to duplicating information losing information or spending more staff time on organizing information we'll start by talking about the types of data typically collected by nonprofits just to reduce it to three categories we can look at this as owner information financial information and we're treating this separately and operations all three of these inform your day-to-day operations and allow you to fulfill your mission but what we'll see are the ways in which this information is connected and what you can do with that so we'll start with the first category here donor data for many of you is helpful divide this information by campaign let's say you participate in givingtuesday at the end of the year or you hold raffles at your annual gala collect on-site donations or receive donations through your website what information are you really collecting there well it's going to be the necessities donor name the amount maybe the campaign itself donor address and other contact information like email address if you use donor management software most likely you're doing something a little more sophisticated with that information like creating a donor profile to help you understand how frequently they donate the average donation amount identifying donations by region or age group that sort of analysis now for those of you using donor management software some of the most popular solutions are bloomerang razor's edge salsa or donor perfect I'll just make a note that all these have really robust features both for importing and exporting donor information but you can run into problems too I have the most experience personally with bloomerang so I'll just talk about that for my example let's say you just started subscribing to bloomerang and you want to import donor information that you've been tracking in spreadsheets maybe if one spreadsheet that's an export of donations made through website another spreadsheet of on-site cash donations and then a third spreadsheet that's an export from QuickBooks the trouble there is that most likely some of the information is duplicated between those spreadsheets if someone donor through your site then you would have recorded it in QuickBooks the trouble with bloomerang just for example is that it does not identify duplicates very well if you pull up a donor profile they call them constituent profiles and look up John Smith well let's say John made a two thousand dollar donation in March of 2018 now if you're using that software to try to get an understanding of how much the average donor gives or what campaigns have been the most effective that duplication is going to artificially inflate your numbers this obviously has a negative effect on your strategy well around the topic of donations I'd love to hear some feedback on Facebook donations you know go ahead send a tech contact date approach I oh just so we have that but you know how you can create a campaign on Facebook and add that little donate button below people use this a lot especially at the end of the year for and if you're giving giving Tuesday the problem that I personally have encountered with this in the past is that while it's great getting those smaller donations and reaching a wider audience it does have the drawback of not getting a lot of donor information they can just click that button and since there's a third party processing it you don't get the email address maybe not even their full name or their real name or any of that great information that you can otherwise use to develop a tailored campaign so those are just pros and cons to consider while you're developing your data strategy let's move to the last point then just the last segment here of financial data the second one actually sorry now I'm treating this as a separate category largely because of how the information is processed this is where we can talk about your programming I had a quick look at people who had registered for the webinar and would like to receive copies later and it sounds like a lot of you are coming from organizations that have programs for kids after school programs homeless wareness assistance volunteering programs and that one common feature tends to be fundraising events gala so ticketed events maybe these tickets are sold through your website or sold on site during the event anything through the site has added benefit of pulling that really great information by your name amount billing address and the email now I think most of you if not all of you are also interested in pursuing grants now I just have a quick note on that since that is a fairly complicated topic in itself but some of the information that you're managing there relevant to our topic today is event attendance information tracking how much money was spent on something specific like local artists programming for children for seniors and so on and so now let's look at the final piece here that operations data for just to round things out sure you're tracking the available grant opportunities and deadlines but for our topic today it's really the marketing or outreach information that should be considered carefully when developing a data strategy maybe you've been building lists of contacts to promote your programming lists of Facebook groups meetup groups or web forums where you post announcements and call for volunteers many of you probably have a volunteer database either you're tracking this in spreadsheets or you have software to manage something like I volunteer and finally almost everyone has a newsletter every one of these databases contains valuable information that can intersect with other parts of your operation volunteers are perhaps the most likely group that can be converted into donors are you syncing your volunteer database with your donor database or are you only working with a list of existing donors what about subscribers to your newsletter have they been included as well just a few more considerations as you work on your data strategy now let's talk about intersections how can you make the most of your data well you can do that by finding connections so we've covered three main areas donors financial data operations data here's some places where you may want to look for those intersections have a look at donor information and order information to help get a more accurate picture of engagement I mentioned merging your volunteer database with the donor database syncing your newsletter subscribers with the donor database as well the reason for that is maybe you have different types of fundraising campaigns throughout the year capital campaign versus a fundraiser for youth program let's say these are very different types of projects and someone who's interested in supporting your youth program may not be all that interested in your capital campaign you want to make the most of a donor database without risking donor fatigue sending out too many communications that just are not of interest so it helps to develop the targeted campaign if you're only sending emails to potential donors with an interest in youth programming then they're more likely to stay engaged rather than unsubscribe completely let's go over a few pro tips then a question that we get sometimes is is it too late for me to develop my own data strategy they've been in business for three years of say I already used all the different software solutions what can I really do well there are plenty of things that you can do even after running for a few years that can help you streamline your data and plan at least or the quarter or for a specific event so let's talk about managing data on a budget what can you do right now today without paying for a consultant or software step one first look over the data that you have so that you have a clear picture of what all needs to be managed things I've mentioned already our newsletter subscribers volunteers donors if you have a youth program then it would probably help to have information on the parents these are individuals who clearly are engaged with your mission and support it and then of course financial information step two is to sync that information we've talked about how you may be storing that information in different places boomerang I volunteer website MailChimp for the newsletter and Excel spreadsheets for on-site donations all of these allow you to export that information into a spry if you're looking for a way to unify those contacts into a single audience let's say to upload into your donor management software and you create those targeted campaigns this is the way to do it export them all merge them into one spreadsheet from there you're gonna want to remove all the duplicates like I manage like I mentioned before this is especially important for some types of donor management software that will not catch the duplicate names and finally are you still using paper records I know it sounds like a joke to some of you but I've worked for organizations I do have boxes and boxes of handwritten records it's important to digitize obviously we're looking at technology solutions here today so that's gonna be something that we're recommending things like event attendance or kitchen sales versus alcohol sales I know it seems expedient in the moment easy for volunteers to manage just pen and paper but it will be a headache later when you're trying to develop an accurate picture of your financials or event attendance if it's only a few records then it may not be too difficult to have a volunteer or intern sit with a scanner and to do this but if it's boxes and boxes of records that I do want to encourage you to reach out since data products does offer scanning services so if you go to the site data products tile you can get a quote there for digitization services and finally questions if we touch on a topic today and you'd love to hear more or you have questions related to this or anything related to data strategy data management go ahead and send us an email contact at data products IO or you can just go to our site listed there data products on I own have a look at our services and please feel free to reach out learn more you